Microsoft Power BI is one of the market’s leading business intelligence suites. It includes a range of tools that enable you to ingest, process, analyse and visualise data.
Using Power BI, you can aggregate sales, web analytics, customer touchpoints and other business-critical data, then turn it into insights that drive revenue.
In this article, we cover Power BI in greater detail, including how it helps achieve your business goals and the different licencing options available to you.
Table of contents
- What is Power BI?
- What are the benefits of Power BI?
- Is Power BI free?
- Power BI pricing and licences
- Examples of Power BI dashboards and use cases
- Need help setting up Power BI?
What is Power BI?
As a part of Microsoft Power Platform, Power BI is a business intelligence tool that enables you to take data from a range of sources and turn it into information and visualisations.
The core tools and features of Microsoft Power BI include:
- Easily import datasets from various sources into Power BI for analysis and visualisation.
- Utilise intelligent visualisation to find new and actionable insights from data that you can use to hit your business goals.
- Share reports and visualisations in shared workspaces and embed them in Microsoft Teams, Word, Excel, and other Microsoft 365 applications.
- Protect your data and demonstrate compliance with advanced encryption and user authentication.
Benefits of Power BI
Microsoft Power BI has the tools and insights you need to quickly identify opportunities, respond effectively, and understand long-term trends to drive continuous optimisation.
The benefits of Power BI include:
- Ease of use: Power BI offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, making it easier than ever for beginners to learn and use the tool.
- Real-time data: Get the insights you need faster with intelligent, interactive dashboards. Spot opportunities sooner with all your KPIs in one intuitive dashboard.
- Seamless integration and collaboration: Easily integrate data visualisation in Microsoft 365 and other applications. Make faster, well-informed decisions by easily sharing even complex insights.
- Scalability: With a cloud-based platform and robust data modelling capabilities, businesses can quickly adapt to their needs as they grow.
- Cost-effectiveness: Power BI offers flexible pricing that suits a variety of organisational sizes.
Is Power BI free?
There is a free version of Power BI, but it only allows you to create visualisations without all the extra features, such as publishing and collaboration, advanced AI, etc.
Along with the free version, there is a range of licence options, from Pro to the embedded version, allowing you to incorporate analytics into your applications.
Power BI pricing and licences
Power BI pricing depends on your licence type. As of April 2025, these were the starting prices of the two most common licences:
- Power BI Pro - £10.80 user/month, paid yearly (excluding VAT)
- Power BI Premium - £18.50 user/month, paid yearly (excluding VAT)
Power BI Pro is also included in the Microsoft 365 E5 enterprise licence. If you already have the E5 licence, you can get started with Power BI today.
A £10.80 per user/month add-on is available for users with Power BI Pro, Microsoft 365 E5, and Office 365 E5 licenses to upgrade to Power BI Premium per user.
Power BI Pro vs Premium
The Power BI Pro licence allows you to create the full range of reports and visualisations. It has the data storage and tools required to collaborate on these within small teams. It doesn’t have the advanced AI tools and data storage, and the number of times data can be refreshed each day is lower.
Power BI Pro is ideal for smaller teams with just one or two data analysts. With it, your users can create compelling analyses and visualisations based on the data imported from connected data sources. They can refresh that data, updating it from the source up to eight times a day.
The Power BI Premium licence has higher storage and data refresh limits. It also comes with advanced AI capabilities. Ask natural-language questions with Microsoft Copilot and Azure Machine learning for enhanced pattern discovery and data analysis.
Whereas Power BI Pro comes with 10GB of data storage per user, there is no per-user data cap. Users with a premium licence get 100TB of data storage shared among all users. Premium users can also refresh data up to 48 times a day.
This allows Power BI Premium users to process far more significant amounts of data. Organisations working with large, continuously refreshing datasets will find these capabilities invaluable. For instance, if you’re optimising real-time digital sales, production facilities with thousands of data points, you’ll be better served by the sophistication and power of Power BI Premium.
Examples of Power BI dashboards and use cases
Given the many different uses you can put business data to, there are almost limitless uses for Power BI dashboards. Here are some of the most common.
- Present constantly updating sales figures: Use the Power BI PowerPoint add-in to ensure that the sales data in your re-usable presentation is always accurate.
- IT spend analysis: Continuously cross-check IT spend with performance and business goals, to ensure you have the right resources.
- Sales and returns analysis: Mine your historic and real-time sales and return data for insights to help improve sales, revenue and inventory efficiency.
- Procurement optimisation: Use data and data-driven insights to optimise your procurement for cost efficiency.
- Discover revenue opportunities: Analyse cross-department data to find new revenue opportunities are every stage of the customer journey.
- Hiring and retention analysis: Analyse your hiring and retention strategies to understand return on investment and optimise both for the future.
Need help setting up Power BI?
Texaport is one of the UK’s leading Microsoft 365 experts. Our consultants will help you work out which Power BI licence is right for you. We’ll help you configure Power BI for your use case to maximise your return on your investment.
Find out how we can help you achieve your business goals with Microsoft Power BI. Or contact us today to speak to one of our Microsoft experts.
